“Right behind you, Ruth Ann,” Harold said, and for the space of a heartbeat his voice came from the phone against my ear and from the top of the loft stairs at the same time. Abby spun around. He stood in the narrow doorway, in his Sunday suit and his church shoes, with the long brass key of the sanctuary swinging from one finger. He had never looked kinder. “I saw the hymnal on the organ bench,” he said. “I knew you would come looking for Walter. I told myself I would wait in the sanctuary and give you a few minutes alone with him.” His eyes dropped to the cigar box under my arm.
I tell you honestly that I was more afraid than I have ever been, in seventy four years. I was afraid for Abby, who is twenty four and stands five foot two in her stockings. But something rose in me, slow and cold and steady, that I recognized as the stubbornness of a Methodist organist wife who had sat through thirty eight years of budget meetings. “Harold,” I said, “this is the box that Walter hid behind the largest pipe. It has a bank statement in it, and a photograph of a check. I would like you to tell me what the check is.”
He did not tell me. He came one step into the pipe chamber and held out his hand, palm up, in the gesture of a man who is asking for a hymnal. “Ruth Ann, please. Give me the box. You do not understand what is in it. It was only a loan, and I put it back, and Walter misunderstood.” The air in the chamber smelled of dust and old wood and a faint sweetness of varnish. Behind him, the loft stairs fell away steeply into the dark. I remembered that Walter had said, laughing, that a man could climb them blindfolded. He had not said that a man could be pushed down them.
A hymnal back cover kept a pencil warning safe for four years behind the loudest pipe in the church.
“Grandma,” Abby said, very quietly, “I have been recording since the church door.” She held up her phone with the red dot glowing. “Pastor Dana is in the narthex. So is Deputy Kruger. I texted them from the sanctuary when I saw the hymnal on the bench.” Harold did not move for what felt like a full minute. His gaze went from the phone to my face to the box. Then, very slowly, the courtesy drained out of him like water from a tub. What was left was a tired, gray, calculating old man I had never actually met, who had been wearing my friends face for four years.
He lunged. He was seventy six years old and not a small man, and he went for the box with both hands. I stepped back, and Abby caught my arm, and the box slid, and the lid flew open. The iron key, the bank statement, and the photograph skittered across the floorboards. Harold dropped to his knees to snatch them. And then the door at the foot of the loft stairs banged open, and heavy boots came up the steps two at a time, and a voice I did not know called out, loud and clear, “Harold Voss! Put your hands where I can see them.”
Deputy Kruger was a broad shouldered woman in her fifties, with a gray braid and the weariness of a person who had broken up too many church picnics. She cuffed him on the floor of the chamber with the gentleness of long practice. Harold said nothing. He only looked at the photograph, lying beside his knee, the forty thousand dollar check with his own signature on the back. Pastor Dana appeared behind her, white as paper, and she took one look at me and wrapped me in her arms with the smell of coffee and fabric softener, and I wept at last.
The iron key, it turned out, fit the old safe in the choir room. Deputy Kruger opened it that afternoon with the treasurers own copy of the key ring and an order from the judge. Inside were the real ledgers of the building fund, in the tidy hand of Walter, and a sealed letter addressed to the church council. It said, in pencil, what Walter had seen: a hundred and ninety thousand dollars drawn over eleven years for a roof repair that never happened. It said that he had confronted Harold on a Thursday. It said, in the last line, I forgive him. I hope he asks.
Harold pleaded guilty to embezzlement, and, after the state police reopened the investigation into the loft, to the manslaughter of my husband. He confessed that he had followed Walter up the stairs that Thursday to talk, and that when Walter turned his back, he had simply put out his hands. The judge, a woman who had once sung in the youth choir, gave him twelve years. When she read the sentence, Harold looked across the courtroom at me. I do not know what I expected. Regret, perhaps. What I saw was only an old man, finally ashamed.
The congregation raised the money to replace the roof without touching the building fund. The house of Harold was sold, and every dollar went back into the account. On the Sunday after the verdict, I sat in my usual pew, in front of the organ, with the sunshine falling through the colored glass onto the open hymnal in my lap. The pencil marks of Walter ran down the margin of every hymn, small and exact. Beside the number of the last hymn, in the back, he had written a short line I had never noticed. For Ruthie. Sing it loud.
Abby played the organ that Easter. She had taken lessons as a girl, and she had practiced for six months on the old Wurlitzer in my parlor. She climbed the loft stairs in a navy dress and sat at the bench with her back straight, and when the first chord rolled out through the sanctuary, I felt it in the soles of my feet. I closed my eyes. For the length of the hymn, the whole church was full of my husbands sound, and I sang it as loud as I could, off key, with tears running into my collar, and nobody minded in the least.